Harper and O'Connor can't escape torture scandal
Robert Peffers
By Derrick O'Keefe | April 27, 2007
Is this Canada's Abu Ghraib?
There are, to be sure, significant differences between the torture
scandal currently engulfing Ottawa and the one that rocked the Bush
administration three years ago. There are no gruesome photos and,
unlike the U.S. abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture in Afghani
stan is being done by Canada's local allies.
But in many ways this scandal is equal to the outrage of Abu Ghraib.
With the photographic evidence of the abuse in Iraq, even old Donald
Rumsfeld could not have pulled the straight-faced performance of
Stephen Harper and Gordon O'Connor in the House of Commons this week.
Faced with the shocking accounts from Afghan detainees featured in The
Globe and Mail this week, Harper had the audacity on Tuesday to
dismiss the reports as “allegations of the Taliban.”
Graeme Smith, The Globe and Mail correspondent in Afghanistan (and, by
the Prime Minister's appalling logic, a Taliban spokesperson),
conducted weeks of research touring “medieval nightmare” prisons and
interviewing 30 detainees. Smith recorded accounts of beatings,
electric shock, whipping, freezing and starvation among the methods
employed by the security forces to which Canadian soldiers turned over
their detainees.
On Wednesday, The Globe and Mail delivered the knockout punch to
Harper's and the Conservatives' evasions and denials. The headline
summed it all up, “What Ottawa doesn't want you to know: Government
was told detainees often faced 'extrajudicial executions,
disappearances, torture and detention without trial'.”
A 2006 report on Afghanistan compiled for Foreign Affairs Canada
provides proof that the Conservative government knew about all of
this, contrary to everything O'Connor and the PM have been saying for
months - and what they, incredibly, continued to assert in the House
this week. Key passages of the Afghanistan report were blacked out,
but The Globe and Mail obtained an original copy. The censored
content, what Ottawa didn't want us to know, includes the following
passages:
Despite some positive developments, the overall human rights situation
in Afghanistan deteriorated in 2006.
Extra judicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention
without trial are all too common. Freedom of expression still faces
serious obstacles, there are serious deficiencies in adherence to the
rule of law and due process by police and judicial officials. Impunity
remains a problem in the aftermath of three decades of war and much
needed reforms of the judiciary systems remain to be implemented. (The
Globe and Mail, A1, April 25, 2007)
It is important to note that the torture scandal that has exploded in
recent days is something that the anti-war movement and human rights
activists have been trying to expose for years. Lawyers Against War,
Amnesty International and academics like University of British
Columbia professor Dr. Michael Byers have long been sounding the alarm
that Canada was in violation of the Geneva Convention by handing over
detainees to almost certain torture and abuse.
This includes, lest we forget, handing over prisoners to U.S.
authorities, who have established their own facilities for “enemy
combatants” at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and the infamous
Guantanamo base on occupied Cuban territory.
Canada's complicity in torture has also been a motivation for the many
groups across the country advocating for troops out of Afghanistan.
Those who have defended the current NATO mission as a “humanitarian
intervention” have lost a lot of credibility this week.
For instance, in a recent feature essay in This Magazine, Vancouver
journalist Jared Ferrie does not mention torture once and makes a bold
assertion, “for all its flaws, the current Afghan government's human
rights record is light years ahead of any in the past three decades.”
Rather than “light years ahead,” Afghanistan's current situation looks
like more of the same that the country has endured for decades:
Counter-insurgency war, corrupt government, “medieval” prisons and
widespread torture. This has accompanied the long tradition of foreign
intervention, pursued in turn by the UK, the USSR and the U.S.
Canada is now deeply complicit in all of this, and neither the denials
of Stephen Harper nor the rationalizations of liberal interventionists
will be able to change that fact.